I don’t normally check in with Yelp in the course of writing a review (well, I never do), but after my meals at Andersonville’s new Mexican restaurant Cantina 1910 I couldn’t help but take a look at what the sheeple were saying.
Whatever happened in the interim, she’s returned as a chef full of surprises and ready to upend expectations of what Mexican food has to be, with a keen sense of what works, and the superb raw materials to make it happen. The servers at Cantina 1910 come equipped with the familiar spiel about the food being traditional Mexican with a midwestern farm-to-table MO, but the resulting suspicion that the food will be dumbed down for the flavor averse is never realized. Dávila pulls no punches when it comes to heat levels and intentionally bitter notes, and knows how to balance them with bright and assertive flavors. Take the esquites: a bowl of large and small corn kernels, rich with brown butter spiced with morita chiles, a hint of musty epazote bitterness, and thin slivers of brittled lime crumbled into the mix to add acidity. Or the guacamole: pristine ripe, creamy fruit crushed and laid out in a neat rectangle like an avocado sheet cake, topped with shredded raw rutabaga and microgreens, and accompanied by sturdy tostaditas, fried in beef fat and coated with a thin sheen like a glazed doughnut.
Pastry chef Andrew Pingul has a wide range too, with warm churro loops and classic panaderia-style conchas for breakfast but also more upscale takes on familiar desserts, like a firm but still milky tres leches cake with dollops of boozy cajeta and thick corn-chip-infused whipped cream, or simpler sopapillas—tiny pockets of sugared fried dough meant to be dipped in dark molten chocolate with a scoop of tangy whipped honeyed goat cheese.
5025 N. Clark 773-506-1910 cantina-1910.com
